Actually, not exactly. While it's a popular meme of 'college = job prep', colleges aren't trade schools. That's what trade schools are for. There's a reason why you cannot get out of general ed courses, for instance. Colleges are as much a journey as their access to jobs is a destination.
Many people have forgotten that college is for a) providing young adults time to discover who they are and what they want, b) developing a necessary understanding of citizenship and rational decision making in complex societies, c) providing a basis of knowledge to prepare future generations, and d) providing flexibility of mind and knowledge to adapt to future situations. Without these, the average young adult would have less idea of what they wanted in life, would be more susceptible to negative influence and false logic, would have a society that may not run in a way that provides a means of making a good living, and would be in a society where the trickle-down effects of poor education would compromise their grade-school learning. College is about a lot more than just getting you a plush job in a cubicle somewhere (which, by the way, will probably be ripped from under your feet in 15-20 years when you're older and less capable of change).
If you ignore these, you fall for a typical fallacy among college students, whereby majors that are not directly leading to a job and career is considered a waste of time. One specific outcome of believing this is believing women getting a degree and then exiting the work force to have kids as having inherently less value to society than their partner who stays in the workforce, which when you consider the above reasons for college, clearly is a thought lacking in scope. But there are many other silly outcomes like this you'll come to if you think college = better job.
I'm not disputing that you can typically get a better job with higher pay with a college degree. I recognize the way things work now with degree inflation is that nearly everyone should go to college, because most other people have and you have to prove yourself at least at their level - a vetting and ranking process. In many respects the masters degree is the college degree of the first half of the 20th century, thats why I have two:) Nevertheless, the money as driving factor is a presumption that I'm not sure is entirely correct. Lots of people go because other people are going, because it's the thing to do, because it's a rite of passage in society. Most everyone would agree that having a degree is better than not, obviously. But we're intellectual beings in an increasingly intellectually rigorous society, and there are many needs that the promise of more money does not satisfy to your average 17-18 year old. They want to know what the world is, where interesting stuff is, who they are not who their parents want them to be, or even just what college is. Its only a select few that are occupying themselves with thinking about being investment bankers and other high paying post-college jobs, and those kids often burn out or change their minds when they realize things like law or accounting are, indeed, boring professions.
These kids aren't thinking job job job, they're thinking life life life. Let me put it another way - if money via job was the reason for college, why are there so many college grads that are going into obviously low paying professions? And don't answer with some elitist internet 'because they're dumber and less logical than me' stuff, please.
You are correct in that at a certain resolution very small sensors don't do any further resolving and only add noise and file size.
Remember though, dSLRs have significantly larger sensors than atypical point and shoot or a cameraphone. So while they're 2x the resolution, their sensors are 4-6x the size and thus take much clearer pictures.
I'm going to call bullshit. This has *nothing* to do with marketing running a company versus some (often hypothetical) socially- and managerially-adept engineers... aside from the fact that this meme is always dragged out whenever an engineering company doesn't do well, in this particular instance you didn't have to have much foresight to see AMD was in a world of hurt GIVEN WHAT INTEL WAS DOING, not whatever hypothetical power struggle / religious war was going on between engineers and MBAs within AMD.
To use your logic, lets look at the products at the time. AMD ate Intel's lunch with the Athlon because they weren't prepared for AMD to make such a leap into the high end (e.g. Intel was not anticipating having to compete much), Intel responds hastily and with fear with the P4, and then they grew up a bit and put out a REALLY competitive part. One that takes many years to develop. Then they lowered their prices, because they could. Being a company that is SIXTEEN times the size of AMD, when Intel puts their weight behind something, it's going to hurt, and when Intel wants to outspend or undercut you, they can. Their 65nm yields were particularly good, and out comes the Core2 to sweep the floor on every gain that AMD made. What's changed is the competitive landscape, and what we're seeing is the effects of that competitive landscape trickling down into the market.
AMD would have to have started work on the Core2 killer at least a year or two before the merger, and on a very limited budget. As a small company their advantage should be speed and flexibility, but when the competition is moving fast as well... you can only do so much. Oh, and I'm sure you know this, but Intel has always been ahead in process, 9-12 month lead usually. When the market demanded more low power parts, guess what? That process advantage REALLY made a difference.
To get back to the speed and flexibility argument, this is where the merger makes some sense - exploit a new opportunity (stream processing/gpgpu/whatever) based on some incrementally better feature you have (hypertransport) and hit from a new angle. Not just 'doing whatever Intel is doing but with a green palette'. Oh and guess what? The people who probably orchestrated that were not all engineers. *gasp*
Anyone who looked at competition (or any history of mergers) could have called the layoffs.
Oh, and if you want an example of a processor company run by engineers, take one look at DEC. No matter how great your technology, if you're not managed well you'll fail.
This is a dangerous post. One that needs to be challenged.
Your PHP analogy is entirely false as it relates to non-competes. They don't say that *anything* you learn on a job is non-transferable to the next job. I know almost nothing about non-competes but I do know that your interpretation could at best be considered 'creative' but really, it's just plain ridiculous.
If you learn something specific as it relates to methods that a company considers 'trade secrets' you might be more on track regarding the actual usage of the law (e.g. I'm coding in PHP for a specific set of routines that deal with X Y Z that are new and super secret and that somebody in the company showed me was how we do it).
To be a little more blunt, what right do you have to someone else's IP? If you walked in and saw how some code worked at a company, then promptly quit and got another job, and then took that knowledge to a new company doing the exact same thing, that's treading more towards stealing trade secrets and not woe-isth-me-I-can't-work working stiff sob story. There are grey areas in these situations, and that's where the interest of the employee and the business are managed through things like non-compete agreements and subsequent rulings relating to them.
Dave, Your questions are appreciated, but you're making a very strong statement, and one I'm not sure you're coming at with the right background and mindset. A lot of what you're saying ('while simulations,... they're generally poor at providing background', '15 minute game', 'most games are simply multiple choice...', 'gender bias, stereotype threat') is referencing an existing base of games, not identifying the potential for learning based on mechanics that are recognized as providing some very real, deep learning that is difficult to get in today's schools given NCLB and teaching to the test. Notice I said mechanics - not games. Why? There's a lack of good educational titles, as I'm sure you have found in your studies. This is the biggest problem that plagues educational games post-skill&drill titles that dragged down the industry last decade.
Moving forward, to understand the potential for learning that game mechanics provide, I suggest reading up on this field, or better yet enter in the world of commercial games development. Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2005) is a good start, but there are countless game design books out there. Nevertheless, just as in school, reading is not as good as doing. This is one of the fundamental problems with the educational games industry - the requirement that you must think both like a game designer and an educator, not either-or. And frankly, to think like one and know what is possible, you need to be one, not just pick it up once or twice. This is not to disparage you or your work, but you spent a comparably slim amount of time looking at this field, and games is a field that you must live and breathe to develop the right mindset to see what is possible, not just what is available.
In your statement you say that games don't translate into the kinds of learning that kids need to succeed in the world, but then you go and criticize games for not helping kids get better scores on tests. I'm sure you know this, but lets be clear about tests: they're varying levels of bunk. I hope your studies at HGSE showed you the relatively poor preparation for the real world that currently employed methods of assessment provide learners. Not only are most tests questionable in their goals vs their execution, but more importantly tests are designed with a certain type of instruction in mind. Therefore, games as a new form of instruction are not going to allow students to perform significantly better in an existing test (nor should they - games that do this are precisely the 'skill & drill' games that have been shown to be bunk). If someone learns some real critical reasoning and problem solving skills in a game, lets be honest - the MCQ the kid gets isn't going to test that, as a) the test just doesn't have the capability to get the kind of rich data needed to find that out, and b) the context is both different and useless to the problem. I recognize that you disclaimed the test being important to governments (agree), but if we're thinking outside the box here in the hopes of finding better methods of educating, lets think a bit beyond current constraints. If you build it, they (tests) will change. This goes for the 15 minutes point as well - not all games can be shoehorned into a 45 minute class period, but is that a problem with games? Not all learning can fit in the rigid confines of existing school structures, and perhaps that kind of learning is more important anyways.
This test issue highlights another flaw in your argument - the transfer from screen to paper isn't important, it's the transfer from screen or paper to real life that matters. In this context, games as tools to let students engage in performances can do much better than almost any method available (recognizing that performance assessment in the 90s was not as successful as it could be, it's fundamental premises were sound, and games offer a different take on it). Of course, nothing beats a one-on-one with a highly educated, engaged, and otherwise perfect teacher, but in real life instruction games have f
Learning should be about fun because 'flow', the state between frustration and boredom, is an inherently fun and motivating place to be. If a game is tuned to the learner's level of knowledge, and provides the learner with a challenge that is at the bounds of what they can do, the learner will be engaged, holding all other things constant (e.g. the rest of the expected game mechanics should be there, the graphics shouldn't suck, there should be some polish, no bugs or random crashes, etc).
On the other hand, you must remember that no 'fun' game exists that does not have (sometimes long) moments of frustration and boredom as the player tries to reach a certain goal. Do you *really* think that fishing or killing rats or endlessly forging is the most fun thing in the world? Nah, it sucks, but players in WoW, EQ, etc wind up doing it for hours and hours and hours.
Suggested reading: Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'
oh, and that statement about 'furthering from reality'... look at a multiple choice test. In the 'doing things through demonstration vs talking about ways that you might do something via 4 choices' spectrum, guess which is probably closer to reality? You are right that parents need to be heavily involved though - no one thing is a panacea, nor should any one thing be expected to be.
As for putting money into R&D to create incentives... I'd conjecture that just like in games, rewards must come early and often to keep kids motivated. Kids don't stick around for that eventual career payout 15 years down the line, unless our entire culture were shaped to build up to it (it's not). Two things are needed - show why that future career is cool and others are not as cool (not just a 5 minute lesson), and show more immediate, visible outcomes from learning the things necessary to get to that career. It's not like there's a dearth of R&D jobs to begin with though - here in silicon valley we're hungry for competence.
Disclaimer: game designer (with real commercial credits!), studied education & psychology, currently developing educational games
I seem to remember some article mentioning about 20% of PS3s went to Ebay. I don't remember where it was (dammit I can't karmawhore!). It's definitely a lot, but not 'most'.
that's kickass man. I did the same with my parents and got the same reaction. I don't invest in games-related stuff to keep myself nice and neutral on my favorite industry however. Probably a mistake on my part;)
Just FYI, according to the same iSuppli article, Microsoft is actually making a profit now on each Xbox 360. I believe the # for the premium unit was around $325. Microsoft has done an excellent job managing their supply chain and manufacturing risk. They knew what it took early on to make a technically advanced yet low risk and relatively unchallenging platform to program for, and they're reaping the rewards now. They negotiated good contracts w/ IBM and ATI, while Sony went the bleeding edge route with the Cell and in turn a) came out with an inferior and costlier product than what was planned (less powerful, terrible yields), and b) had to come back to Nvidia last minute paying through the nose for the graphics that the Cell couldn't do.
I'd say most of the goofs are not on the marketing end at Sony - the product basically sells itself given the 110m install base of PS2s. By merely existing it was destined to become #1, but unfortunately it doesn't exist for most people, and even when it does it is out of reach for most previous customers. Marketing played the cards they was dealt from the manufacturing end. Sure they took some risks in hyping things up, but they were following the same basic (successful) strategy as the PS2 (anyone remember the marketing for the emotion engine?)
please. there's LOTS of work left to do in individual software productivity. e.g. as a knowledge worker, the information that comes to me is terribly unsorted and difficult to archive. see the woeful inadequacy of email. next, i want machines out there finding and pushing data to me that is relevant to my business. nevermind the eye tracking and brain-computer interfaces of the next 20 years. there's lots of room left in productivity enhancement - although hardware is overpowered for what software we typically use now and therefore producivity isn't magically made better with more hardware upgrades, we're just getting started on the information side of things.
While they have English Common Law, business isn't particularly efficient in India. Entrepreneurship is much more difficult than in China due to the government's bureaucracy. Correct me if i'm wrong but you can't just decide to set up shop and then go and do it in the way the Chinese can, despite their pseudo-communist system (in reality China is fairly free market, and hasn't been communist in the traditional sense for quite some time)
Sorry that's wrong on two fronts: 1. 'low cost as strategy' rarely is a good ultimate strategy in business and 2. lack of respect for IP isn't "capitalist".
I'm sure you already know this, but the reason we have IP (in capitalist countries) is to encourage innovation. The less (good) IP is respected, the less incentive there is to innovate. Of course here on slashdot we know that not all IP encourages innovation, but this is a pretty egregious example of where lack of IP is going to hurt innovation and that's where the problem lies.
If there's one way that Samsung can respond to this, it's to stop manufacturing in China, and perhaps stop selling there too. Rock and a hard place though.
I think we're confusing 'geek pop culture' with REQUIRED reading for games. I appreciate the list, but none of these are required - only a good understanding of mechanics and the 'classical' notion of games design is required, not content that appeals to an oversaturated demographic. In fact, I ascribe to a philosophy of 'dont get boxed in by other people's ideas'. Watch these movies 1000 times each, and every game you design will be exactly like these movies - completely derivative. Never watch them, and your imagination may stumble upon something really cool.
while these hypotheticals may account for 1-2% of the total 35+ college demographic, it almost certainly doesn't account for 30%. I think I must invoke the 'you are on slashdot, therefore you are automatically the exception' rule:)
The #s are based on comScore Media Metrix's demographics, which I discovered are quite faulty (and thanks to businessweek, not reality checked!). I did lots of research in this area and ran many comScore reports to verify the accuracy of these #s. comScore demographics are based on the owner of the computer that is running comScore software (e.g. often, say about 30% of the time, this is the parents computer).
Go on facebook and search for profiles of users 35-54. In the San Francisco network (a pretty hip and with it place to be i hear) you'll find less than 100 profiles, out of the many many thousands in the region 35. Queries like that are where you find the true numbers.
Agree. MMOs are the single biggest challenge for both game design and execution, and for all intents and purposes are infinite in scope as they are never truly complete. For someone who's last 10 years have potentially given us an idea of what actual contributions he had in his successes before then, he needs to start small and make a GOOD game to restore people's faith in his abilities. By small, I mean inexpensive and fast turn around, not 'mobile is where every failed game designer goes to lick their wounds and restore their pride' small.
Daikatana was similarly huge in scope and he demonstrated he couldn't execute. Who's going to pay for that again? He has a little bit of the Doom cred left that he can cash in, but if this one flops I'm afraid he's done.
Caveman: "I'm hungry. I want to hunt for some small rodents. I'm not very fast or strong and I really would like some food now. Know where I can find where some hide?"
Cavedot: "Oh, you don't want to do that. What you reall want to do is catch a wooly mammoth, you'll appreciate the meat so much more, and you'll learn how to take down an 8 ton beast in the process.. what could be cooler than that? What you should do is go over there and lift those rocks until you get strong enough, then go find a large branch and make a set of spears yourself, then go roam the tundra for 20 days until you see a mammoth. It's easy."
From what I know of Torque, it isn't a very well documented codebase and therefore is very difficult to work with. I'm not sure how much this has changed or how well maintained it is nowadays (given it's genesis as the Tribes 2 engine way back when), though I commend Garage Games for putting in effort. A while back a friend and I evaluated a bunch of cheap engines and the cleanest one out there to use was OGRE, though it had no games-specific libraries and was only a rendering engine. I'm not sure what cheap engines are available for the 360 - I do know that Epic licenses the Unreal engine differently based on copies sold, and if they price it right, that could allow independent developers to use a pretty good engine (again though, I've heard stuff about the difficulty writing for it due to documentation and unclean code).
I agree though that Xbox Live is the delivery mechanism - it's opened a whole new market for independent games distribution, which otherwise suffered from hassles associated with installation, awareness, etc. The market size is much bigger.
It's about time Nintendo decided to embrace developers again. Sony's done a good job of alienating them recently with the PS3, and at some point something's gotta give. It might be this generation.
'overkill' says the guy who put down $800-$1000 on his CPU alone.
What this means is that in retrospect, you could have spent $300-$400 on a nearly equivalent CPU (say.. 200mhz slower and mult-locked) and put the rest of the value into another graphics card that could make your games look significantly better, enhancing the overall gameplay experience and costing you no more money. The marginal gain on an FX relative to a regular A64 is very little compared to the marginal gain of another graphics card that now has the ability to do an even wider variety of things. Given that it's a gaming rig you're talking about, I imagine the bottom line is games, and as such you should be happy about advances in this market.
That is, unless you're bitter you spent a lot of money, and decided to use your post to sublely brag about how awesome your CPU is.:)
I think there's a confound in your argument: War is good for innovation, regardless of social system. Let me pose it another way - in peace time do you think the soviets would have been much interested in innovation? Without a market or a way for an individual to benefit from their hard work there is less purpose or drive toward innovation.
Can you provide some facts (or even anecdotes!) to back up your statement?
To use your method of persuasion: If one cannot provide basic information about ones argument, one resorts to using general statements that cannot be supported or refuted in an attempt to correlate the two.
Who is America? How have they been bamboozled? What are they doing to show they're not putting up with 'it'? Where is NPR in all of this? You didn't mention them once.
I don't think that it's necessarily because CA is a really 'liberal' state (remember it voted for Bush/Reagan in those years, and in the last election *i think* only 57-60% voted for Gore), but because CA has the largest population of all states, and as you get big you get nice and inefficient!
Not to defend inefficient government or anything, but 1 person out of 124 working for the state isn't something to be freaked out about.. think of all the people that educated you (provided you aren't a private school weenie), police, fire, judges, legal anything, paved the roads, managed (or mismanaged) the city, county, etc, managed/mismanaged power/water, etc etc etc. If less than 1% can keep the lives of the 99%+ running, that isn't too crazy.
Well, both my parents probably had their info stolen:(
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Actually, not exactly. While it's a popular meme of 'college = job prep', colleges aren't trade schools. That's what trade schools are for. There's a reason why you cannot get out of general ed courses, for instance. Colleges are as much a journey as their access to jobs is a destination.
:) Nevertheless, the money as driving factor is a presumption that I'm not sure is entirely correct. Lots of people go because other people are going, because it's the thing to do, because it's a rite of passage in society. Most everyone would agree that having a degree is better than not, obviously. But we're intellectual beings in an increasingly intellectually rigorous society, and there are many needs that the promise of more money does not satisfy to your average 17-18 year old. They want to know what the world is, where interesting stuff is, who they are not who their parents want them to be, or even just what college is. Its only a select few that are occupying themselves with thinking about being investment bankers and other high paying post-college jobs, and those kids often burn out or change their minds when they realize things like law or accounting are, indeed, boring professions.
Many people have forgotten that college is for a) providing young adults time to discover who they are and what they want, b) developing a necessary understanding of citizenship and rational decision making in complex societies, c) providing a basis of knowledge to prepare future generations, and d) providing flexibility of mind and knowledge to adapt to future situations. Without these, the average young adult would have less idea of what they wanted in life, would be more susceptible to negative influence and false logic, would have a society that may not run in a way that provides a means of making a good living, and would be in a society where the trickle-down effects of poor education would compromise their grade-school learning. College is about a lot more than just getting you a plush job in a cubicle somewhere (which, by the way, will probably be ripped from under your feet in 15-20 years when you're older and less capable of change).
If you ignore these, you fall for a typical fallacy among college students, whereby majors that are not directly leading to a job and career is considered a waste of time. One specific outcome of believing this is
believing women getting a degree and then exiting the work force to have kids as having inherently less value to society than their partner who stays in the workforce, which when you consider the above reasons for college, clearly is a thought lacking in scope. But there are many other silly outcomes like this you'll come to if you think college = better job.
I'm not disputing that you can typically get a better job with higher pay with a college degree. I recognize the way things work now with degree inflation is that nearly everyone should go to college, because most other people have and you have to prove yourself at least at their level - a vetting and ranking process. In many respects the masters degree is the college degree of the first half of the 20th century, thats why I have two
These kids aren't thinking job job job, they're thinking life life life. Let me put it another way - if money via job was the reason for college, why are there so many college grads that are going into obviously low paying professions? And don't answer with some elitist internet 'because they're dumber and less logical than me' stuff, please.
You are correct in that at a certain resolution very small sensors don't do any further resolving and only add noise and file size.
Remember though, dSLRs have significantly larger sensors than atypical point and shoot or a cameraphone. So while they're 2x the resolution, their sensors are 4-6x the size and thus take much clearer pictures.
I'm going to call bullshit. This has *nothing* to do with marketing running a company versus some (often hypothetical) socially- and managerially-adept engineers... aside from the fact that this meme is always dragged out whenever an engineering company doesn't do well, in this particular instance you didn't have to have much foresight to see AMD was in a world of hurt GIVEN WHAT INTEL WAS DOING, not whatever hypothetical power struggle / religious war was going on between engineers and MBAs within AMD.
To use your logic, lets look at the products at the time. AMD ate Intel's lunch with the Athlon because they weren't prepared for AMD to make such a leap into the high end (e.g. Intel was not anticipating having to compete much), Intel responds hastily and with fear with the P4, and then they grew up a bit and put out a REALLY competitive part. One that takes many years to develop. Then they lowered their prices, because they could. Being a company that is SIXTEEN times the size of AMD, when Intel puts their weight behind something, it's going to hurt, and when Intel wants to outspend or undercut you, they can. Their 65nm yields were particularly good, and out comes the Core2 to sweep the floor on every gain that AMD made. What's changed is the competitive landscape, and what we're seeing is the effects of that competitive landscape trickling down into the market.
AMD would have to have started work on the Core2 killer at least a year or two before the merger, and on a very limited budget. As a small company their advantage should be speed and flexibility, but when the competition is moving fast as well... you can only do so much. Oh, and I'm sure you know this, but Intel has always been ahead in process, 9-12 month lead usually. When the market demanded more low power parts, guess what? That process advantage REALLY made a difference.
To get back to the speed and flexibility argument, this is where the merger makes some sense - exploit a new opportunity (stream processing/gpgpu/whatever) based on some incrementally better feature you have (hypertransport) and hit from a new angle. Not just 'doing whatever Intel is doing but with a green palette'. Oh and guess what? The people who probably orchestrated that were not all engineers. *gasp*
Anyone who looked at competition (or any history of mergers) could have called the layoffs.
Oh, and if you want an example of a processor company run by engineers, take one look at DEC. No matter how great your technology, if you're not managed well you'll fail.
This is a dangerous post. One that needs to be challenged.
Your PHP analogy is entirely false as it relates to non-competes. They don't say that *anything* you learn on a job is non-transferable to the next job. I know almost nothing about non-competes but I do know that your interpretation could at best be considered 'creative' but really, it's just plain ridiculous.
If you learn something specific as it relates to methods that a company considers 'trade secrets' you might be more on track regarding the actual usage of the law (e.g. I'm coding in PHP for a specific set of routines that deal with X Y Z that are new and super secret and that somebody in the company showed me was how we do it).
To be a little more blunt, what right do you have to someone else's IP? If you walked in and saw how some code worked at a company, then promptly quit and got another job, and then took that knowledge to a new company doing the exact same thing, that's treading more towards stealing trade secrets and not woe-isth-me-I-can't-work working stiff sob story. There are grey areas in these situations, and that's where the interest of the employee and the business are managed through things like non-compete agreements and subsequent rulings relating to them.
Dave,
Your questions are appreciated, but you're making a very strong statement, and one I'm not sure you're coming at with the right background and mindset. A lot of what you're saying ('while simulations,... they're generally poor at providing background', '15 minute game', 'most games are simply multiple choice...', 'gender bias, stereotype threat') is referencing an existing base of games, not identifying the potential for learning based on mechanics that are recognized as providing some very real, deep learning that is difficult to get in today's schools given NCLB and teaching to the test. Notice I said mechanics - not games. Why? There's a lack of good educational titles, as I'm sure you have found in your studies. This is the biggest problem that plagues educational games post-skill&drill titles that dragged down the industry last decade.
Moving forward, to understand the potential for learning that game mechanics provide, I suggest reading up on this field, or better yet enter in the world of commercial games development. Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2005) is a good start, but there are countless game design books out there. Nevertheless, just as in school, reading is not as good as doing. This is one of the fundamental problems with the educational games industry - the requirement that you must think both like a game designer and an educator, not either-or. And frankly, to think like one and know what is possible, you need to be one, not just pick it up once or twice. This is not to disparage you or your work, but you spent a comparably slim amount of time looking at this field, and games is a field that you must live and breathe to develop the right mindset to see what is possible, not just what is available.
In your statement you say that games don't translate into the kinds of learning that kids need to succeed in the world, but then you go and criticize games for not helping kids get better scores on tests. I'm sure you know this, but lets be clear about tests: they're varying levels of bunk. I hope your studies at HGSE showed you the relatively poor preparation for the real world that currently employed methods of assessment provide learners. Not only are most tests questionable in their goals vs their execution, but more importantly tests are designed with a certain type of instruction in mind. Therefore, games as a new form of instruction are not going to allow students to perform significantly better in an existing test (nor should they - games that do this are precisely the 'skill & drill' games that have been shown to be bunk). If someone learns some real critical reasoning and problem solving skills in a game, lets be honest - the MCQ the kid gets isn't going to test that, as a) the test just doesn't have the capability to get the kind of rich data needed to find that out, and b) the context is both different and useless to the problem. I recognize that you disclaimed the test being important to governments (agree), but if we're thinking outside the box here in the hopes of finding better methods of educating, lets think a bit beyond current constraints. If you build it, they (tests) will change. This goes for the 15 minutes point as well - not all games can be shoehorned into a 45 minute class period, but is that a problem with games? Not all learning can fit in the rigid confines of existing school structures, and perhaps that kind of learning is more important anyways.
This test issue highlights another flaw in your argument - the transfer from screen to paper isn't important, it's the transfer from screen or paper to real life that matters. In this context, games as tools to let students engage in performances can do much better than almost any method available (recognizing that performance assessment in the 90s was not as successful as it could be, it's fundamental premises were sound, and games offer a different take on it). Of course, nothing beats a one-on-one with a highly educated, engaged, and otherwise perfect teacher, but in real life instruction games have f
Learning should be about fun because 'flow', the state between frustration and boredom, is an inherently fun and motivating place to be. If a game is tuned to the learner's level of knowledge, and provides the learner with a challenge that is at the bounds of what they can do, the learner will be engaged, holding all other things constant (e.g. the rest of the expected game mechanics should be there, the graphics shouldn't suck, there should be some polish, no bugs or random crashes, etc).
On the other hand, you must remember that no 'fun' game exists that does not have (sometimes long) moments of frustration and boredom as the player tries to reach a certain goal. Do you *really* think that fishing or killing rats or endlessly forging is the most fun thing in the world? Nah, it sucks, but players in WoW, EQ, etc wind up doing it for hours and hours and hours.
Suggested reading: Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'
oh, and that statement about 'furthering from reality'... look at a multiple choice test. In the 'doing things through demonstration vs talking about ways that you might do something via 4 choices' spectrum, guess which is probably closer to reality? You are right that parents need to be heavily involved though - no one thing is a panacea, nor should any one thing be expected to be.
As for putting money into R&D to create incentives... I'd conjecture that just like in games, rewards must come early and often to keep kids motivated. Kids don't stick around for that eventual career payout 15 years down the line, unless our entire culture were shaped to build up to it (it's not). Two things are needed - show why that future career is cool and others are not as cool (not just a 5 minute lesson), and show more immediate, visible outcomes from learning the things necessary to get to that career. It's not like there's a dearth of R&D jobs to begin with though - here in silicon valley we're hungry for competence.
Disclaimer: game designer (with real commercial credits!), studied education & psychology, currently developing educational games
I seem to remember some article mentioning about 20% of PS3s went to Ebay. I don't remember where it was (dammit I can't karmawhore!). It's definitely a lot, but not 'most'.
that's kickass man. I did the same with my parents and got the same reaction. I don't invest in games-related stuff to keep myself nice and neutral on my favorite industry however. Probably a mistake on my part ;)
Just FYI, according to the same iSuppli article, Microsoft is actually making a profit now on each Xbox 360. I believe the # for the premium unit was around $325.
Microsoft has done an excellent job managing their supply chain and manufacturing risk. They knew what it took early on to make a technically advanced yet low risk and relatively unchallenging platform to program for, and they're reaping the rewards now. They negotiated good contracts w/ IBM and ATI, while Sony went the bleeding edge route with the Cell and in turn a) came out with an inferior and costlier product than what was planned (less powerful, terrible yields), and b) had to come back to Nvidia last minute paying through the nose for the graphics that the Cell couldn't do.
I'd say most of the goofs are not on the marketing end at Sony - the product basically sells itself given the 110m install base of PS2s. By merely existing it was destined to become #1, but unfortunately it doesn't exist for most people, and even when it does it is out of reach for most previous customers. Marketing played the cards they was dealt from the manufacturing end. Sure they took some risks in hyping things up, but they were following the same basic (successful) strategy as the PS2 (anyone remember the marketing for the emotion engine?)
please. there's LOTS of work left to do in individual software productivity. e.g. as a knowledge worker, the information that comes to me is terribly unsorted and difficult to archive. see the woeful inadequacy of email. next, i want machines out there finding and pushing data to me that is relevant to my business. nevermind the eye tracking and brain-computer interfaces of the next 20 years. there's lots of room left in productivity enhancement - although hardware is overpowered for what software we typically use now and therefore producivity isn't magically made better with more hardware upgrades, we're just getting started on the information side of things.
While they have English Common Law, business isn't particularly efficient in India. Entrepreneurship is much more difficult than in China due to the government's bureaucracy. Correct me if i'm wrong but you can't just decide to set up shop and then go and do it in the way the Chinese can, despite their pseudo-communist system (in reality China is fairly free market, and hasn't been communist in the traditional sense for quite some time)
Sorry that's wrong on two fronts: 1. 'low cost as strategy' rarely is a good ultimate strategy in business and 2. lack of respect for IP isn't "capitalist".
I'm sure you already know this, but the reason we have IP (in capitalist countries) is to encourage innovation. The less (good) IP is respected, the less incentive there is to innovate. Of course here on slashdot we know that not all IP encourages innovation, but this is a pretty egregious example of where lack of IP is going to hurt innovation and that's where the problem lies.
If there's one way that Samsung can respond to this, it's to stop manufacturing in China, and perhaps stop selling there too. Rock and a hard place though.
I think we're confusing 'geek pop culture' with REQUIRED reading for games. I appreciate the list, but none of these are required - only a good understanding of mechanics and the 'classical' notion of games design is required, not content that appeals to an oversaturated demographic. In fact, I ascribe to a philosophy of 'dont get boxed in by other people's ideas'. Watch these movies 1000 times each, and every game you design will be exactly like these movies - completely derivative. Never watch them, and your imagination may stumble upon something really cool.
while these hypotheticals may account for 1-2% of the total 35+ college demographic, it almost certainly doesn't account for 30%. I think I must invoke the 'you are on slashdot, therefore you are automatically the exception' rule :)
The #s are based on comScore Media Metrix's demographics, which I discovered are quite faulty (and thanks to businessweek, not reality checked!). I did lots of research in this area and ran many comScore reports to verify the accuracy of these #s. comScore demographics are based on the owner of the computer that is running comScore software (e.g. often, say about 30% of the time, this is the parents computer).
Go on facebook and search for profiles of users 35-54. In the San Francisco network (a pretty hip and with it place to be i hear) you'll find less than 100 profiles, out of the many many thousands in the region 35. Queries like that are where you find the true numbers.
Hope that helps!
Agree. MMOs are the single biggest challenge for both game design and execution, and for all intents and purposes are infinite in scope as they are never truly complete. For someone who's last 10 years have potentially given us an idea of what actual contributions he had in his successes before then, he needs to start small and make a GOOD game to restore people's faith in his abilities. By small, I mean inexpensive and fast turn around, not 'mobile is where every failed game designer goes to lick their wounds and restore their pride' small.
Daikatana was similarly huge in scope and he demonstrated he couldn't execute. Who's going to pay for that again? He has a little bit of the Doom cred left that he can cash in, but if this one flops I'm afraid he's done.
Ahh slashdot.
Caveman: "I'm hungry. I want to hunt for some small rodents. I'm not very fast or strong and I really would like some food now. Know where I can find where some hide?"
Cavedot: "Oh, you don't want to do that. What you reall want to do is catch a wooly mammoth, you'll appreciate the meat so much more, and you'll learn how to take down an 8 ton beast in the process.. what could be cooler than that? What you should do is go over there and lift those rocks until you get strong enough, then go find a large branch and make a set of spears yourself, then go roam the tundra for 20 days until you see a mammoth. It's easy."
Caveman: "..."
From what I know of Torque, it isn't a very well documented codebase and therefore is very difficult to work with. I'm not sure how much this has changed or how well maintained it is nowadays (given it's genesis as the Tribes 2 engine way back when), though I commend Garage Games for putting in effort. A while back a friend and I evaluated a bunch of cheap engines and the cleanest one out there to use was OGRE, though it had no games-specific libraries and was only a rendering engine. I'm not sure what cheap engines are available for the 360 - I do know that Epic licenses the Unreal engine differently based on copies sold, and if they price it right, that could allow independent developers to use a pretty good engine (again though, I've heard stuff about the difficulty writing for it due to documentation and unclean code).
I agree though that Xbox Live is the delivery mechanism - it's opened a whole new market for independent games distribution, which otherwise suffered from hassles associated with installation, awareness, etc. The market size is much bigger.
It's about time Nintendo decided to embrace developers again. Sony's done a good job of alienating them recently with the PS3, and at some point something's gotta give. It might be this generation.
'overkill' says the guy who put down $800-$1000 on his CPU alone.
:)
What this means is that in retrospect, you could have spent $300-$400 on a nearly equivalent CPU (say.. 200mhz slower and mult-locked) and put the rest of the value into another graphics card that could make your games look significantly better, enhancing the overall gameplay experience and costing you no more money. The marginal gain on an FX relative to a regular A64 is very little compared to the marginal gain of another graphics card that now has the ability to do an even wider variety of things. Given that it's a gaming rig you're talking about, I imagine the bottom line is games, and as such you should be happy about advances in this market.
That is, unless you're bitter you spent a lot of money, and decided to use your post to sublely brag about how awesome your CPU is.
I think there's a confound in your argument: War is good for innovation, regardless of social system. Let me pose it another way - in peace time do you think the soviets would have been much interested in innovation? Without a market or a way for an individual to benefit from their hard work there is less purpose or drive toward innovation.
Can you provide some facts (or even anecdotes!) to back up your statement?
To use your method of persuasion:
If one cannot provide basic information about ones argument, one resorts to using general statements that cannot be supported or refuted in an attempt to correlate the two.
Who is America?
How have they been bamboozled?
What are they doing to show they're not putting up with 'it'?
Where is NPR in all of this? You didn't mention them once.
I don't think that it's necessarily because CA is a really 'liberal' state (remember it voted for Bush/Reagan in those years, and in the last election *i think* only 57-60% voted for Gore), but because CA has the largest population of all states, and as you get big you get nice and inefficient!
:(
Not to defend inefficient government or anything, but 1 person out of 124 working for the state isn't something to be freaked out about.. think of all the people that educated you (provided you aren't a private school weenie), police, fire, judges, legal anything, paved the roads, managed (or mismanaged) the city, county, etc, managed/mismanaged power/water, etc etc etc.
If less than 1% can keep the lives of the 99%+ running, that isn't too crazy.
Well, both my parents probably had their info stolen